


The Lost Weekend (or, to Bizarrodale and back again)

by julietophelia



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/M, Jughead is secretly friends with Sabrina, Magical Accidents, Northside Jughead Jones, Northside Toni Topaz, Sweet Pea has a silent cameo, but Toni exists, set in season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25537486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/julietophelia/pseuds/julietophelia
Summary: “Do you have to be so dramatic? You could have just texted me back.”“Oh, please. Coming from you?” Sabrina crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m a witch. I’m supposed to be weird.”A magical accident by a teenage witch swaps Jughead into a world filled with unfamiliar faces.
Relationships: Betty Cooper & Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones, Jughead Jones & Sabrina Spellman, Jughead Jones/Toni Topaz
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	The Lost Weekend (or, to Bizarrodale and back again)

**Author's Note:**

> This is comics Sabrina I guess because I never watched the Chilling Adventures show. I'm not letting RAS get me to no secondary location.

This was exactly why Jughead didn’t like his birthday.

He’d woken up that morning in Archie’s room, as usual, but there was no air mattress on the floor, and no Archie. No guitar, no comic books littered on the dresser. Instead, his Rebel Without a Cause poster was hanging on the wall, and the picture of Jellybean he always kept with him sat on the nightstand, pristine and uncreased in a silver frame.

When he got up and looked out at Betty’s window, a beautiful girl with pink hair he’d never met before turned around from her vanity, and blew him a kiss. She was topless except for a pink lace bra, but she didn’t seem to mind that he could see her. He turned away, his whole face burning. Sabrina. This had to be Sabrina’s fault.

Downstairs, a big sheepdog jumped up on him, begging to be fed. He fed them both, the two of them sitting along in the stillness and quiet of this not-right house.

That same girl from Betty’s window, whose name he eventually figured out was Toni, appeared again outside his door when he left for school. She was wearing more clothes this time, a blue and pink flannel shirt and a pageboy cap. She kissed him on the cheek and they walked to school together, hand in hand.

He didn’t know how to begin telling her that he wasn’t her boyfriend, had no idea who she was, and that this probably counted as cheating on the girl he had just started dating. Although, his relationship with Betty still felt like a doomed experiment of some kind, somewhere between freakishly mismatched and too good to be true.

He texted Sabrina to demand an explanation. Sabrina always meant well, but she usually made things worse.

“What’s wrong, Sunshine?” Toni asked. “You’re moodier than usual, even for your birthday.”

So it was true, even in whatever this was, money couldn’t buy happiness, or sobriety. There’d been no sign of his mother or Jellybean in the house. He’d searched with just the faintest pang of hope, and found a spare bedroom in place of Mr. Andrews’ office. There was a record player, but no records, and no clothes in the closet. His sister had lived here once, but not anymore.

He wondered where his father was, and if that was something to worry about. It was the most normal feeling he’d had all morning.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“Are you nervous? About tonight?”

“Um, a little, I guess.” The answer seemed to please her. He wondered what the hell was going to happen tonight.

He texted Sabrina again, with more exclamation marks.

…

The day only got stranger from there, if that was even possible. He didn’t recognize anyone at school. The entire student body of Riverdale High had been swapped with strangers.

He headed for his locker, hoping it would be in the same place. He spotted Archie down the hall, and felt a wave of relief. Finally, something here was normal. Except, Archie was wearing a leather jacket, and when he turned, Jughead saw a coiled green snake stitched onto the back. Archie would never join the Serpents. It went against every strand of his DNA.

A dark-haired Bulldog as tall as Reggie shoulder checked Archie as he walked past. Archie took a swing in response, and a fight broke out. Jughead pushed through the growing crowd and tried to pull Archie away.

“What the hell was that?”

Archie rolled his eyes. “Stop acting like my parole officer.”

“You’ll get suspended.”

“I get in trouble no matter what I do.” He shook his head. “You don’t get it. You never do.”

…

At lunch he found one other face he recognized. It was only odd to find him here.

“How are things with your mysterious Serpent bad boy?” Toni asked Joaquin.

“Kevin? A bad boy?” Jughead said, incredulous, without thinking.

They both stared at him blankly. “That was a joke, babe,” Toni said.

He tried to laugh it off. “Sorry. I’m just—”

“Distracted?” Toni laced their fingers together under the table and turned back to Joaquin. “Well?”

“I’m going to ask him to homecoming,” Joaquin said. “It’s a first for both of us. They don’t really have dances at Southside High.”

He was beginning to grasp a pattern. Was Betty a Southsider here, too? A Serpent, even? And Toni must be one in the real world, unless she was created purely out of pixie dust to be his literal dream girl. She seemed real, though.

He scrolled through this Jughead’s prolific Instagram account—this Jughead used Instagram. There were pictures of the sheepdog, pictures of Archie, and a lot of pictures of Toni. They seemed very happy together.

He didn’t know Betty in this world, it seemed. Clearly, Betty and Archie hadn’t grown up next door on Elm Street, and without Archie in common, they had never even met.

He saw a black cat out of the corner of his eye, staring at him through the chain link fence around the schoolyard. He slid out of the bench and grabbed his unfinished bag of chips, folding down the top.

“I have to go,” he told Toni. “I just remembered I left my textbook behind in bio class.”

“Okay. See you later. Don’t be late.”

“What?”

She tilted her head. “For the double feature. John Landis?”

“Right.” He shook his head. “Sorry, of course.”

…

The saying was true; it _was_ bad luck if a black cat crossed your path, especially this black cat. He’d found Salem pretending to be stuck up a tree when he was ten years old, and returned him to his grateful owner, a girl with short blonde hair that was almost white, who’d scolded him like he was a person.

He followed Salem into Fox Forest for what felt like an excessive amount of time, until they came into a clearing. Salem strolled up to Sabrina.

“Do you have to be so dramatic? You could have just texted me back.”

“Oh, please. Coming from you?” Sabrina crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m a witch. I’m supposed to be weird.”

“What the hell did you do, Sabrina?”

“It’s your birthday present.”

“Why the hell would you think I’d want this?”

“You always say your friends don’t understand. You wouldn’t even tell them when you were sleeping at the drive-in.” Sabrina chewed her lip. “It wasn’t supposed to be this literal. But it should wear off by tomorrow.”

“Is everyone going to remember all of this?”

“No. I’m not powerful enough to create a whole reality. I must have switched you, switched us, into a parallel world that already existed.”

“So there’s some… preppy Jughead running around in my world?”

“He’s probably smart enough to play it cool, like you’re doing. He is you. If he messes up, I can just wipe everyone’s memories.”

“No.” He pointed a finger at her for emphasis. “Don’t make this any worse.”

She rolled her eyes. “That one’s simple. I’ve done it tons of times and it almost never goes wrong.”

“No more spells,” he insisted.

“Fine. You can figure out how to explain it yourself.”

“There’s really no way to switch us back?”

“You just said no more spells.”

“That’s different.”

“If there is a way, I don’t know it. It’s only a few more hours, anyway. What’s the rush? Is it that bad here?”

It wasn’t, and that was the frightening part.

…

It felt wrong to go on a date with this girl he didn’t know, this girl who wasn’t Betty. But if this was some other Jughead’s life, he probably shouldn’t screw it up for him. He just had to pretend to be normal for a few more hours.

More than that, it felt weird to go with anyone other than Archie. He hadn’t planned on telling Betty about his birthday, and now he wondered whether he should have. For years, the only way he’d acknowledged his birthday was going to a double feature at the Bijou with Archie. It was like their secret blood brother ritual.

He used to be so jealous of Betty, when they were kids. It was embarrassing to think of it now. Archie had declared in second grade, that he was going to marry Betty when they both turned 18. The only thought in his 8-year-old brain had been that Archie wouldn’t have any time to play with Jughead anymore. Up until a few months ago, he’d known, as sure as breathing, that someday Betty and Archie would end up together, and leave him behind.

He thought of that angry, troubled Archie he’d found that morning, and wondered if he ever felt abandoned.

He walked Toni home after the double feature. She lingered at the end of the walkway, looking expectant. He kissed her, aiming for her cheek. She turned into the kiss, making it land awkwardly at the corner of her mouth.

She was standing close to him, too close. “Well, aren’t you going to come inside and unwrap your present?”

Oh. That was definitely too far.

“I don’t want you to think you have to do that for me,” he stammered.

“I want to, Juggie,” she said, sliding her hands up his chest and playing with his collar. He dodged another kiss and saw hurt in her eyes. “It’s okay if you changed your mind.”

“I just, yeah. I think we should wait.”

“Okay.” She shifted on her feet awkwardly, nervously. “Good night, then.”

He kissed her good night, just a peck, for other Jughead’s sake. Her lip gloss tasted like strawberries. He watched her walk up the path to Betty’s house and disappear behind the red door, and only then he could breathe again.

He paced up and down the sidewalk, watching the time on his phone tick closer to midnight. Sabrina promised it would only last a day. He wondered if it would just happen. Did he have to be asleep?

He was avoiding going back to Archie’s house. He didn’t want to chance that his not-father was there. It was too much to face some strange version of him, the same but different, a version who’d had so many more chances and still, apparently, fucked it up.

The numbers changed, flicking from 11 to 12. Nothing seemed different. Just as he was about to call Sabrina and give her a piece of his mind, he noticed the light was on in Archie’s room. He was already back.

…

“I’m so sorry Cheryl crashed your party last night,” Betty said. “It was such a mess.”

He was suddenly glad to have spent the last day in bizarro-world.

“You don’t have to apologize for what Cheryl Blossom does.”

“I just wanted to do something nice. Be normal for once, you know?” She studied his face. “Did what Chuck said about me freak you out?”

“No, of course not. Why would I believe anything that jerk said about you?”

Betty paused, then nodded. “Right, yeah. Good.”

They kept walking.

He wondered if Betty had liked the other Jughead better.

The question haunted him over the next few weeks, as everything fell apart. His dad was arrested, then Weatherbee expelled him, and Social Services swooped in to send him back where he belonged. Even Fred Andrews thought he was a burden. Betty would never show it, but she must feel the same.

The tension built between them until, the day before he was set to transfer to Southside High, it exploded. They had a nasty fight. He said things he didn’t mean, and a few that he did. He shouted that he was sick of being her charity case. She said he never really understood her. The last thing he said, about Archie, made her tear up and walk away without another word.

He was doing her a favor, really. Everyone else wanted him gone, and Betty trying to help him only put her in danger. He tried to tell himself that, but it didn’t make him feel like any less of an asshole.

Sometimes he thought about Toni. Sunnyside wasn’t that big. He must have been really oblivious to not notice a girl with pink hair walking around. She could go to Seaside, or Centreville. Maybe she’d never even been born here.

What would he even say to her, if he did meet her? I had a dream that we would have fallen in love if our lives had been completely different?

Once, when he’d gone to Sunnyside to bring his dad breakfast, just before everything went to hell, he swore he saw her, a flash of pink and black out of the corner of his eye.

…

Southside High had metal detectors at the entrance. They were probably the most modern technology in the whole building. He had to take his hat off just to get in, which annoyed him more than he was already annoyed.

He looked up and was met with a camera flash. Before he could form a snarky remark, his eyesight recovered and there was Toni. Not a dream, in the flesh. She called him Forsythe and he was too stunned to correct her at first. She must think he was an idiot, the way he was staring at her.

He might just make it through this, he thought.


End file.
